Assistive motion control of cycling wheelchair based on investigation of load on user

Abstract

Though several kinds of equipment such as wheelchairs and electrical wheelchairs exist to support lower limb disabilities, there were still problems because of disuse of lower limbs that limits effect of rehabilitation and also cause disuse syndrome. To overcome these problems, cycling-wheelchair was invented by Handa et al. It is a pedal-driven wheelchair and can be applied to most of the patients whose lower limbs could be bent. It is mainly used for rehabilitation in facilities that have plane floor and uphill with small angle. However, the device has a problem in everyday use, which it needs more force to travel through steeper uphill or level differences. In this paper, we conduct an investigation that targets lower limb disabilities and unimpaired persons to clarify the load on users when they overcome difficult environments by measuring tread force on pedals. The result showed that uphill costs the user large load that some of the users could not overcome the uphill. To overcome this situation, for the first step, we designed a travel-resistance compensation control for a cycling-wheelchair.